16.
1029 Hours, February 22, 2442
Epsilon System, Giltabar, Central Fork Academy
He was dead, he knew it. Captain Zach Malor was ready to die. The Terran Alliance Royal Marine that was on top of him, holding the bead down on his weapon. But he wasn't quite sure who, but he heard a familiar voice shout, "Get on your feet!" Zach twisted and the Marine began to fall.
Zach tingled with a warm feeling inside as he felt the conditioning kick back into place, and the Marine's water-slow falling confirmed that. As Zach came out of the roll, he reached up, seized the barrel of the rifle, and jerked the Marine down in the opposite direction he came up.
Fragments of rocks tumbled around them, the artillery continued to boom overhead, as well as the smaller weapons exchanging fire, so it was difficult to hear the Marine scream as Zach ripped the rifle out of his grip, clasped his hand on the Marine's left wrist, closing his fingers around the tactic. Strengthened by the conditioning, Zach simply tore off the tactic, taking the Marine's entire hand with it. The mesh that protected the Marine trickled away, abandoning him, dissolving from his head down to his ankles as he clutched the stump of an arm, his mouth speaking unheard words. He looked around and spotted his hand lying on the ground. "My hand," he finally found the words. "My hand…"
Zach only had a few more seconds to make his decision. He could either kill him or just let him go. The Marine seemed in too much of a shock to no longer be considered a threat. Then a memory flashed through his head, back to the last time he had been at Giltabar, and had been faced with a identical situation. His decision then?
The wrong one.
Shifting up to the Marine, Zach began talking softly. "It's all right," he told the Marine. "Just be quiet. It's going to be okay." He slid his arm around the Marine's back as he lifted his leg, and found his K-bar. "It won't hurt anymore."
The Marine had a split second before he looked down, saw Zach's K-bar coming toward his gray-and-azure utilities, to said, "Tell my mom I'm sorry…"
The K-bar sunk into the Marine's chest, and he died immediately in Zach's arms. Zach closed his eyes. He had just robbed a mother of her son—maybe her only child. He hated himself as war made him shudder once more. He hated himself. He had killed the Marine that was in his arms with extreme prejudice.
He lowered the Marine's body to the ground and took off toward the admin, the conditioning still flowing inside. He found Second Lieutenant Davyd Byrd, along with his platoon sergeant, a young man named Carson. They were huddled together in a alcove, their gazes far away as they monitored their troops images in their PCDs.
"Lieutenant Byrd," Zach barked as he rushed to the alcove. Then he realized something. There was only two people here. "Where's Captain Kurbanov?"
A second or so passed before Byrd pulled himself away from monitoring. "Sir?"
"I said: Where's Captain Kurbanov?"
"Sir, I don't know sir. And with all due respect, I'm kinda busy right now." His gaze went distant again and he shouted at no one around him; obviously ordering the officers, inside the admin, around.
Zach activated his PCI, ordering the mainframe to show him Victor Kurbanov's location.
"Unable to locate Captain Kurbanov."
"What do you mean?"
The mainframe repeated stoically, "Unable to locate Captain Kurbanov."
"Has his tactic been removed?"
"Unknown."
Shaking his head and cursing to himself, Zach opened the command channel. "Kurbanov? Copy?"
"Captain, we have to move," cried Byrd, tugging at Zach's arm.
Zach ignored Byrd's desperate voice. "Kurbanov, do you copy?"
If he did, Zach didn't hear.
A standard artillery shell whizzed nearby, dropping no more than ten meters beside them, exploding in a blinding white lightning storm, tore a gaping hole in the alloy wall, and sent shock waves rumbling through the ground as the three of them dropped for cover.
"Kurbanov? Copy?" Zach repeated. "Victor?!"
Byrd clambered in front of him. "Sir! We're locked on. We have to move!"
Zach swore, got up, and hustled his way to the wall, with Byrd and Carson falling in behind him, FALARs at the ready. They reached the southeast corner of the building, and Zach took a glance around the corner. It was clear.
"I wouldn't be here if you had obeyed orders, and followed without second-guessing my command," Zach glared at Byrd, keeping his voice low and steely. "I'd be up at my tent, which wouldn't be a massive hole in the ground now. And now I can't reach the XO."
"Sir, I'd be happy to talk about this after we obtain our objective."
"Oh, we'll be talking. And you won't be happy. Let's go."
Sprinting alongside the eastern side of the building, darting between walkways, knee walls, and low-lying shrubs until they reached an entrance where earlier four Terran Marines had set up a bunker using lightweight alloy blast plates to create a silvery carapace behind which they had manned turrets. Now, artillery fire from one of the TWSN guns had blown apart the shield, and the smart shrap from the shield had ignited to repeatedly poke at the Marines' combat meshes like a billion tiny, sharp-edged angry jackhammers making one hundreds thrusts per second. Their remains, covered by pale, wet internal organs, lay across the shattered blast plates.
Zach waved Byrd in front of him; Byrd ran to the destroyed bunker. "Good," Byrd muttered. "We'll coordinate from here."
"Get the Sixth and Seventh out of there," Zach ordered. "Get them back to their original positions."
"Sir, I protest. Twenty-Second is getting their ass kicked inside of the admin."
"Not for long. Just get your squads out… now. Cover us when we come out."
He stood up and headed toward the entrance, one of the doors half hanging off from the blast.
"Sir? You're not going in there, are you?" Carson asked.
"Just wait for my signal."
Byrd smiled, glad that Zach was going to take off on what seemed like a suicide run. "Yes, sir."
Zach stepped over the dead Marines, ducked, and forced his way past the shattered door as he heard Byrd give the order over the general frequency for the Sixth and Seventh squads to fall back and reinforce the Eight outside. With Byrd's platoon back in line, all Zach had to worry about was about the Twenty-second and –third, whose objectives was to breach the admin and neutralize all hostilities while attempting to cause no or minimal damage to the structure.
Turning right, down a corridor that would take him past a long box of offices, Zach heard the muffled boom of microcharges and the closer sound of laser fire. With light sticks mounted on the wall, either shattered or flickering, Zach paused, brought up a thermal view in his PCD, then reached for one of his K-bars. The sick odor of something burning made Zach grimace and scrunch his nose.
He turned a corner and found the source of the smell. At least twenty bodies lay along the corridor, some Terran Alliance marines, other green recruits from Zach's own company. His mainframe zoomed in on each of the casualties, identified each victim, then noted the loss in the TWSN central database. Familiar names flashed again and again, the mainframe now a beacon of death. Nearly every member of the Twenty-third squad lay in the hall, incinerated by the Terran Alliance's latest toy: a silent laser rifle that dismembered you with surgical precision. For nearly all of Zach's people, this had to have been their first and last combat experience.
He found his mouth opening, words only coming in gasps. In all the chaos for the past hour, he had failed to keep close taps on the number of troops he had lost.
Someone rounded the corner ahead. Zach tensed, shrinking to his knees. A FALAR lay three feet away from him. His PCD zoomed in, and IDed the soldier.
Zach breathed a sigh of relieve when it was confirmed as a marine in the Twenty-third. The Marine staggered down the hall, his mesh down, his FALAR hanging limply at his side. As he drew closer, Zach saw the burn on the side of his head—a near miss from one of those lasers. The Marine drew closer, tripped over a corpse, then fell to his knees.
Getting up, Zach went to the Marine and scooped him up in his arms. "Marine? Can you hear me?"
The Marine blinked his eyes open. "Get down to the second sublevel, sir…" And he collapsed in Zach's arms. Dead.
Zach shoved him away, took off running down the corridor. "Mainframe? Can you locate Captain Kurbanov yet?"
"Negative."
He sighed as he headed down the corridor, careful not to trip over any of the corpses as his mainframe IDed more casualties. It took him five minutes to get down two levels. The air was deathly still and quiet in the sub-levels. According to his mainframe, the rest of the platoon was pinned down here by four squads of Terran Marines. Crouching behind a pair of glass doors, Zach chanced a quick look:
A maze of box offices inside made for an urban combat environment that even experienced MOUTs
would dread. Zach figured that by the time your mainframe could tell you that there was a marine behind a desk that Marine would be dodging from cover and firing.
Close quarters or not, Zach knew he was responsible for each and every TWSN soldier hiding in that maze. The lights were dimmed down low, and off in the far left corner of the room, sparks flickered down to the ground. But he also knew that the Terran Marines were in fact, closing the perimeter around his men, getting ready to flush them out.
Zach got on the platoon's command frequency. "Sergeant Rein? Copy?"
"Copy, sir," replied the young woman Zach imagined crouched behind some piece of furniture, her short, black hair damp with sweat.
"In about ten seconds, you're going to be surrounded. I want you to push all three of your squads back, toward the main entrance, north side. Get them into the stairwell and out of here."
"We're falling back, sir?"
"Affirmative. Now go!"
"Aye-aye, sir!"
Even as she relayed the orders to her people, plasma fire erupted from the Terran Marines, cutting loose with a deafening echo that would've made any de-meshed soldier clutch his ringing ears.
With his knife in his hand Zach eased open the glass door, ran through and down the aisle of offices, adrenaline pumping through his veins. He came to an intersection and glanced left, then right, and locked gazes with a Marine against the wall, not more than five feet away.
Even as the Marine fired a stream of laser fire at Zach, he ran up the wall, tipping to his side, falling on top of the Marine. By the stunned look of the Marine, Zach figured that he had never seen a conditioned soldier because the Marine stopped firing and gawked up at him as Zach came down on him, thrusting his K-bar through the Marine's combat mesh and into his upper chest.
Wrenching his blade out, the Marine crumpled to the floor sprawled out at Zach's feet blood oozing out of the wound. He turned and charged for a pair of Marines that appeared to his left. The next twenty minutes Zach spent was filled with gut-wrenching violence, slicing throats, breaking bones, snapping necks, driving the butt of rifles into Marine's noses and into their brains. However, it would suffice to say that all but three of Zach's people escaped from the admin while he, single-handedly, killed all twenty-eight enemy soldiers. Were it not for his combat mesh, his hands, arms, chest, and legs would've been drenched in blood—their blood.
When he had finished his massacre, Zach ran for the stairwell, taking the steps three at a time. He reached the first floor landing, seized the door, swung it open toward him—
—and came face-to-face with a Marine holding a CALUM.
He tried to slam the door back, but the Marine stuck his foot into the doorway, and jammed the door. As he fired the Uzi, Zach jumped backwards from the landing to the floor behind him and dodged to the right to the wall. The Marine continued to track him holding the bead. Zach was about to jump down to the next landing when there was a vibrating boom on the landing above him.
Debris rained down the staircase, and when the dust settled the Marine was buried underneath the rubble. Zach snatched up the CALUM and ducked into a hallway.
Seconds later, his PCD alerted him that he had an encrypted comm. waiting and much to his chagrin, it was Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Williams. The man grimaced at the sight of Zach.
"Captain, I'm pulling whatever's left your company out and stationed along the perimeter. The coordinates are being uploaded now. Kilo Company is gonna clean up your mess."
Zach sighed. He had failed as a Company Commander once more. "Yes, sir."
"What are you waiting for?" Williams barked. "Get moving!"
Hustling down the corridor, Zach jogged by a long line of marines from Kilo Company. Their Company Commander, Derrik Kohtana, stopped Zach just outside the door.
"Yeah, Kilo Company will clean up your mess," the man sneered at Zach. Kohtana had a face that looked pretty, even when disgusted. Zach barely knew the man, but he hated him. Kohtana went on: "I don't know why everybody thinks conditioned soldiers are the way to go. I really don't."
"Well, if you knew half as much, you'd know that I could kill you myself: without even touching you."
Kohtana sneered once more and hustled past Zach.
Zach headed toward the eastern entrance and activated his PCD. "Mainframe, have you located Captain Kurbanov?"
"Negative. Captain Kurbanov can not be located."
"Could his tactic been de-activated?"
"Unknown."
"Set alert if his tactic comes back on-line."
"Alert set."
Shaking his head as his jog turned into a run, Zach couldn't figure out what happened to Victor, and his absence made Zach realize how much he depended on him, not just as his friend or the fiercely loyal XO, but as the last remnant of his past life, during boot, the time when neither of them had been blithely unaware of what was to come. A time when Jett represented home to Zach, keeping him safe.
As he ran down the hall, he felt vulnerable. Victor was gone. After Jett, Victor had been his home. Now he was the only one left.
To his disappointment, Kilo Company cleared out the admin building. And several hours later, Zach's company and two others had taken control of the academy grounds. As he sat on a fold-out chair in front of his new command tent, a pair of Praedator jets flew overhead, which meant they had control of the air as well.
The mainframe had yet to tell him anything about Victor when Byrd came up to him and saluted. "Reporting for debriefing, sir!"
"At ease," Zach stood. "We're going to wait for the others."
Byrd's shoulders slumped as he looked around. Second Lieutenant Kayla Lane and Sergeant Rein walked up to the tent. They snapped off a salute as well.
"Have they located Captain Kurbanov's body yet, sir?" Byrd asked, once they debriefing was over.
Zach shook his head. "Captain Kurbanov is listed MIA. Presumed alive." He clung on to that hope.
"Is that the official word?"
"That's my word."
"Permission to speak off the record, sir?" Lane asked.
"Go ahead."
"Kurbanov is probably dead. I lost over half of my platoon. Rein lost even more. And for what?"
"Not glory," Byrd intervened.
"I was drafted, sir," Lane said. "Right after I graduated with a bachelor's degree in agriculture. And at first, I thought I was going to do something noble. Fighting for what you've said—a just and lasting peace. The Alliances have been fighting with us for far too long. But it's not about glory, or nobility. It's all about the money and planets. Our side is just as corrupt as theirs, but only they're going to win. They have more of everything—more resources, more personnel—period. What we're doing, sir, is freely jumping into a death trap."
Zach stood there, looking at his commanding staff; Byrd, a noncommissioned officer from the capital of the Colonial Alliance. Lane, from the farms of Taut Nui, where she was given the word: you're drafted, right after she graduated from college. And Rein, a female from a lumber industry on the earth-like planet Calistoga and didn't believe she could be a good leader.
"Sir, did you hear what I just said?" Lane asked.
He nodded. "Yeah, I'm sorry, El-tee. But I'm not feeling in the mood for changing anyone's mind."
She hoisted her brows.
"Truth is, none of us are ready for this. And I'm sure that there's not enough training that will prepare us for what will happen next. But we're here, in this mess… together. And we'll make the most of it, because I'm in command. We can't go and decide on our own for who needs help, and whose good enough by themselves. We're going to keep our minds clear and do our job. You lost today because you didn't trust me. I make the decisions. I'm not going to hesitate or steer you in the wrong direction. And if I do, I'll pay for it with my life..."
It was around this time that Williams came marching up the hill.
Byrd took a glance at the CO and swore. "Are we dismissed, sir?"
"Dismissed."
"Captain," Williams sang. "Finished debriefing your losers?"
Zach rose, snapped to, and issued a salute before his people ran off. "Sir, my platoon leaders have been debriefed, sir."
"At ease, Captain." Williams looked around, spotted the chair Zach had been sitting on, and dropped heavily on it. "You know, on my way up here, I couldn't help but notice a long line of body bags; and I have to tell you, most of the contents inside were from your company. You were given one hundred and seventy people when you took command of Sirius. What do you have left, son?"
Zach cleared his throat. "Roll stands tall at ninety-one, sir."
"Stands tall?" Williams snorted. "Are you kidding me? They condition a gennyboy, give him a company, only God knows how, loses his XO, loses nearly half his people."
Every muscle in Zach tightened as he fought with himself not to go into the rage-stage, yet he could not help but imagine strangling the Lieutenant Colonel right there. "I have a morale problem, sir. But I'm—"
"Of course you have a morale problem. We all have one. All these kids have been taken from home, handed a weapon, and told to shoot. But you have it even worse because they don't relate to you."
"Because I'm a gennyboy."
"Being a mining kid is one thing but between the neuro and the conditioning, you're not human to them. What're you going to do about that?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Well, you better think about it, Captain. You can't go play Superman every time your company screws up. You have to teach them the right way. Stay back and let them do their job. What you did, today, going in and taking out all those troops… sure you got your people out, but you didn't learn a damn thing about being a commander. You cheated."
"Sir—" Zach protested.
"I'm willing to bet that I'm going to be one of the only officers that you'll ever meet who'll actually give a damn about your character as an officer in the space marines. No doubt about it. There isn't anything I envy about your life; your brother's dead, you got a birthmark on your face, you're graying at the temples because of your messed up conditioning… I don't envy you, not at all. But what I do envy about you, is that the fact you've got a friend in high places. We just received a message from the office of a Ms. Coral Brooks."
Zach couldn't believe his ears. It had been over a year since the last time he had seen the woman. Clearly he had made a good impression on her.
"We're going to set up a platoon," continued Williams. "And send them into the Audubon Caves to wash out any Alliance presence inside… they want you to lead it." He sounded dubious. "But I don't think you're ready."
"Sir, I am ready."
"Are you calling me a liar?"
"Sir, no, sir. Just giving you a different opinion, that's all, sir."
"We'll see." He stood up, the meeting over.
"Sir, would you like me to put together a team?"
"Just so you know, if I had any say in this, you wouldn't be going."
"Sir, yes, sir. I understand, sir."
"I'll be putting together your team, throw in your three losers of platoon commanders—with whom you get along with very well"—a hint of sarcasm in his voice—"And I'll make Kohtana your XO. He'll keep you honest."
Zach let his shoulders slump a little. "Thank you, sir."
Williams turned to leave, but turned around again and look at Zach. "One more thing, Captain; off the record. What do you think happened to Captain Kurbanov? He's listed MIA, as you know, but… do you think he went AWOL?"
"Sir, no, sir."
Williams scratched his chin. "Well, every corpse as been accounted for, except for his. Air search found nothing."
"Sir," Zach said firmly. "Captain Kurbanov would not go AWOL."
He studied Zach, then nodded. "Then he better be dead. Because know one deserts on watch. No one."